Secrets of Eden

“Now, why would we think that? Because no one in the world had the slightest idea where he was-”

“He was in-”

“Because he didn’t return any of the messages you left at his home, his church, or on his cell phone?”

“He was in the Adirondacks. That was his explanation. He said he went with a friend to upstate New York for a couple of days and he was in some rugged corner of the mountains without cell-phone coverage.”

“He was camping? He didn’t strike me as the type.”

“No, he wasn’t camping. But he was in what he described as a relatively primitive log cabin.”

“In the Adirondacks… ”

“Near Statler.”

“Never heard of it.”

“No reason you would have,” he said. “It’s a general store and a billboard, apparently.”

“And there’s no cell coverage there?”

“Nope.”

“He didn’t check his messages at home? He didn’t call in to the church?”

“No, he did not. He said he was calling me back from the interstate, an hour or so from Albany-though he wasn’t coming home. He was heading to New York City. His cell showed he had messages, and so he was returning the calls from the highway.”

I sat back in my chair and took a sip from the water bottle on my desk. I raised my eyebrows to try to relax. “Is he alone? I don’t recall him having any personal Adirondack connections.”

“He says he’s with that friend. He added that she was driving.”

“So you knew he was a responsible driver, I suppose.”

“I suppose.”

“What’s her name?”

He paused for a moment, and in my mind I saw him looking down at his notes. “Heather Laurent,” he answered finally.

“You’re kidding.”

“Why? Should I know that name?”

“Well, you shouldn’t. You have a penis. But women love her books. She writes bestsellers about angels. Frankly, I think she’s a complete and total lunatic. Remember when I was so sick last month with bronchitis and I stayed home? I saw her on one of the morning talk shows going on and on about her latest book. And maybe it was because I was oxygen-deprived and half delusional from the medication, but I swear I thought she was talking about angels like they were our freaking neighbors.”

“Well, he’s a minister. I would think angels would give them something to talk about.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking no. My sense is her take on angels isn’t exactly going to mesh with his. She’s somewhere between New Age and wack job. Her angels, I have a feeling, find you parking spaces when you need one. What did he say about her?”

“Really very little.”

“I think she was in Vermont a couple weeks ago. I vaguely remember something in the newspaper.”

“Mostly I asked Drew about his relationship with Alice and George Hayward,” he said, and then he told me in detail what he had learned-and what Drew wouldn’t reveal. Emmet is a pro, and so he didn’t let on that we had reason to believe from Alice’s journal that either she had one hell of a fantasy life or she and Drew were more intimately involved than anyone knew. And Drew stuck to a pretty simple story: Alice was one of his parishioners, George was not, and he’d offered Alice pastoral counseling.

“Would you say you two were friends?” Emmet said he had asked, and Drew had replied, “Absolutely. We were very good friends.” The detective then inquired whether the minister could recall the last time he’d been to the Haywards’ house, and Emmet said there was a pause and he had wondered whether Drew was deciding whether to admit he’d ever been there. In the end he told the detective he’d been there most recently in, Drew believed, May- other, of course, than the Monday after the Haywards had been murdered. At that point he had asked Emmet why we were looking for him.

“Oh, we’re just tying up loose ends,” Emmet had replied. But he did ask the minister whether he was returning to Haverill anytime soon and where he could be reached if he wasn’t. The answer was Heather Laurent’s loft in Manhattan for at least a few more days and then, maybe, with a couple of different friends around the country. But Drew also said he might simply return to Vermont after leaving Manhattan and get some things from his home before taking that longer road trip. Either way, Drew added, he’d most likely be in areas with cell coverage.

“Did he ask you if he needed a lawyer?” I asked Emmet.

“No.”

“He sounds very accommodating.”

“I said I’d call him if I had any other questions.”

“Do we have something that we know has his fingerprints on it-or even his DNA?”

“We don’t.”

“What about when we were at the Haywards’ the day after their murder? Remember what a scrubber Drew was? How helpful he was?” I said, and it seemed possible now that he had been working like mad to make sure that he’d left behind no evidence of his involvement at the scene Sunday night. Perhaps inadvertently he had left us a lead.

“I vaguely recall him Windexing the windows, but he would have been wearing rubber gloves by the time he grabbed the spray bottle.”

“He moved the coffee table.”

“That’s right. But he was probably wearing the gloves by then, too.”

“And I recall him drinking some kind of diet soda from a bottle,” I said, hoping, if he was implicated, he had gotten sloppy.

“If so, it may still be under the sink. They had a recycling tub under there.”

“Good. And if Drew does come back to Vermont, let’s drop in on him or see if he wants to stop by the barracks. Perhaps we can ask him some more questions before he realizes he needs an attorney and winds up in custodial care.”

“Will do,” Emmet agreed. Then: “And you said Heather Laurent was a bestselling writer?”

“Yup.”

“I wonder how she and Drew became friends. Think they went to school together?”

“It’s possible.”

“Let me look into her, too. Maybe she fits in here somewhere.”

“But don’t talk to her until you’ve talked to Drew again-if possible.”

“I understand.”

I couldn’t imagine Drew traveling with the Queen of the Angels, and so as soon as Emmet and I hung up, I Googled her. I saw she was as pretty as she had struck me on television. And I learned that her father had murdered her mother and then killed himself. I decided then that the two were something more than friends, which made me ponder further the motives that drove the Reverend Drew. I began to wonder whether this Heather Laurent had been involved in the Haywards’ murder as well. A love triangle? Possible. I saw online that she had appeared in Vermont on the Monday the bodies were found, which meant that she might have been here on Sunday night. And absolutely anyone is capable of absolutely anything. I know that. It is, for better or worse, the fallout from my job.

SOMETIMES LATE AT night, I will peer into each of my boys’ bedrooms. Most nights they sleep in their own beds in their own rooms, their doors open, but that summer it wasn’t uncommon for Lionel to grab his pillows and a blanket and curl up either at the foot of Marcus’s bed or in the beanbag chair beside it. He had only been out of a crib for a year and a half. And though he was potty trained, he still slept in pull-ups-just in case. Paul says I will stand there for long minutes in my nightgown, just staring. Intellectually I know there’s a connection between what I see at work most days and the time I spend watching my boys sleep: The weirder my caseload, the more likely I am to act like a sentinel.

They are both very deep sleepers. Their pediatrician once said she believed that little boys sleep more deeply than little girls. I’ve no idea if that’s true, but I know that my sister and I never seemed to slumber the way our brother did. My father would wake me up when it was time to start getting ready for school, and I would hear him